From Salvage to Storybook: A Kitchen Built from American Art Tile

This one is personal. After a long haul, the kitchen is nearly finished — and it turned out weird, beautiful, and completely full of history. It is built, almost wall to wall, from salvaged American art tile, three makers and three states meeting in one room.

The red field — Nabisco Mansion, St. Louis

The glossy red field tiles came out of the old Nabisco Mansion in St. Louis — yes, that Nabisco — the original kitchen tiles from the founder’s Belle Époque estate. They were made by the United States Encaustic Tile Company in Indiana: industrial red clay under a century of gloss, the workhorse surface everything else gets to sing against.

The still center — a Rookwood lakeside

Below the range hood sits a single 12×12 pictorial tile, and it is classic Rookwood: a serene lakeside scene, quietly moody and timeless, pulled from a mansion in Parkersburg, West Virginia. The glaze work is unreal. It is the calm the whole room organizes itself around.

The storybook — nursery rhymes from a Milwaukee school

Up top and around the sides, the figural tiles: nursery-rhyme scenes — Simple Simon, Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son, and their companions — pulled from a turn-of-the-century school in Milwaukee. Made by the American Encaustic Tiling Company of Zanesville, Ohio, and probably designed by Carl Bergmann, who later started his own company in Milwaukee. Their full story is in the Journal.

Why it works

Red-clay industrial, storybook whimsy, and American art-tile royalty, all in one weirdly wonderful place. It feels like it shouldn’t work — and somehow I really believe it does.

What’s left

Next: confirm the termites have finally left — please — and seal up the walls. Then paint them the exact color of the sky behind the nursery tiles. A kitchen that began in salvage, ending in a storybook.

Relic Asylum — Tiles with past lives.